Something Rotten (Thursday Next 4)

'Reptile, goat, cat, human,' murmured the Neanderthal, crouching down and staring intently at the creature as it ran a thin pink-forked tongue across a crisp packet.

'The eyes look insectoid,' observed the SO-13 agent, dart gun in the crook of his arm.

'Too big. More like the eyes we found on the chimera up at the bandstand. You remember, the one that looked like a giant hamster?'

'Same splicer?'

The Neanderthal shrugged.

'Same eyes. You know how they like to trade.'

'We'll take a sample and compare. Might lead us to them. That looks like a human arm, doesn't it?'

The creature's arm was red and mottled and no bigger than a child's. To grasp anything the fingers grabbed and twisted randomly until it found something and then it clung on tight.

'Gives it an age,' said Stiiggins, 'perhaps five years.'

'Do you want to take it alive, sir?' asked the SO-13 agent, breeching the barrel of his gun and pausing. The Neanderthal shook his head.

'No. Send him home.'

The agent inserted a dart and snapped the breech shut. He took careful aim and fired into the creature. The chimera didn't flinch – a fully functioning nervous system is a complicated piece of design and well beyond the capabilities of even the most gifted of amateur splicers – but it stopped trying to chew the bark off a tree and twitched several times before lying down and breathing more slowly. The Neanderthal moved closer and held the creature's grubby hand as its life ebbed away.

'Sometimes,' said the Neanderthal softly, 'sometimes, the innocent must suffer.'

'DENNIS!' came a panicked voice from the gathering crowd, which had fallen silent as the creature's breathing grew slower. 'Dennis, Daddy's worried! Where are you?'

The whole sad, sorry scene had just got a lot worse. A man in a beard and sleeveless white shirt had run into the empty circle around the rapidly dying creature and stared at us with a look of numb horror on his face.

'Dennis?'

He dropped to his knees next to his creation, which was now breathing in short gasps. The man opened his mouth and emitted such a wail of heartbroken grief that it made me feel quite odd inside. Such an outpouring cannot be feigned; it comes from the soul, one's

very being.

'You didn't have to kill him,' he wailed, wrapping his arms around the dying beast, 'you didn't have to kill him . . . !'

The uniformed agent moved to pull Dennis's creator away but the Neanderthal stopped him.

'No,' he said gravely, 'leave him for a moment.'

The agent shrugged and walked to the Land Rover to fetch a bodybag.

'Every time we do this it's like killing one of our own,' said Stiggins softly. 'Where have you been, Miss Next? In prison?'

'Why does everyone think I've been in prison?'

'Because you were heading towards death or prison when we last met – and you are not dead.'

Dennis's maker was rocking backwards and forwards, bemoaning the loss of his creation.

The agent returned with a bodybag and a female colleague, who gently prised the man from the creature and told his unhearing ears his rights.

'Only one signature on a piece of paper keeps Neanderthals from being destroyed, the same as him,' said Stiggins, indicating the creature. 'We can be added to the list of banned creatures and designated a chimera without even an Act of Parliament.'

We turned from the scene as the other two agents laid out the bodybag and then rolled the corpse of the chimera on to it.

'You remember Bowden Cable?' 1 asked. 'My partner at the LiteraTecs.'